GETFund reveals it paid over GHC300k for audit

Ghana Education Trust Fund (GETfund) has exposed the fact that it paid GHC350,000 to the Auditor-General Service to conduct the recent infamous auditing, but the service failed to go through the proper legal procedure in submitting the audit report.

This comment follows controversies that emerged after the Auditor General published names of Members of Parliament, politicians and others who had allegedly benefitted from the GETfund educational scholarship.

Normally per their mandate, the Service was to send the audited report to parliament and then to the Public Accounts Committee where GETFund will be summoned to answer to some questions.

However, the Administrator of GETFund, Richard Boadu in an exclusive interview with Kwami Sefa Kayi on Peace FM's morning show ‘Kokrokoo’, said "this was not done".

Ordinarily, he said, he does not speak to issues on-air, but was forced to go public after the A-G and his assigns hopped from one radio station to the other justifying the "incomplete" report.

“What I don’t understand is why they didn’t give us the final copy when we requested for the auditing? We saw it in the newspapers. It should have gone to Parliament and then to the Public Accounts Committee and then we will be called to respond but not on a radio station. But I realized he is going around talking about the issue and so I decided to speak out because we have nothing to hide,” he stated.

Mr Boadu further revealed that contrary to claims by the Auditor-General that the service undertook the audit in line with its mandate, as captioned in its transmittal letter to Parliament which partly reads: "I have the honour to submit to you a performance audit report on the administration of Scholarships by GETFund Secretariat in accordance with my mandate under Article 187(2) of the 1992 Constitution of Ghana, Sections 13(e) and 16 of the Audit Service Act, 2000 (Act 584) which provide that I may carry out performance and special audits," it was his outfit (GETFund) that "requested" and paid for that particular audit, and brandished correspondence to buttress the claim.

"We requested for the audit. I have a proof of giving them GHC350,000 to do the auditing because they claim they don’t have money. They then brought a draft and asked that we add 2017 and 2018 to avoid the accusation of witch-hunting previous administration…even looking at the report, we realized it fell short. It seems he intentionally captioned it; members of parliament, politicians media practitioners and so on awarded scholarship. According to him, they are not needy; hence should not be given the scholarship,” the GETFund Administrator added.